that order Camus had to live.
That
Tribute to Albert Camus
JEAN-PAUL
Sixpeople wondered:even"What
MONTHS AGO, yesterday,
is he
going to do?" Temporarily, torn by
contradictions that must be respect-
ed, he had chosen silence. But he was
one of those rare men we can well
afford to wait for, because they are
slow to choose and remain faithful to
their choice. Some day he would
speak out. We could not even have
dared hazard a guess as to what he
might say. But we thought that he
had changed with the world as we
all do; that was enough for us to be
aware of his presence.
He and I had quarreled. A quarrel
doesn't matter—even if those who
quarrel never see each other again-
just another way of living together
without losing sight of one another
in the narrow little world that is
allotted us. It didn't keep me
from thinking of him, from feeling
that his eyes were on the book or
newspaper I was reading and won-
dering: "What does he think of it?
What does he think of it at this
moment?"
His silence, which according to
events and my mood I considered
sometimes too cautious and some-
times painful, was a quality of every
day like heat or light, but it was
human. We lived with or against his
thought as it was revealed to us in
his books—especially The Fall, per-
haps the finest and least understood
—but always in relation to it. It was
an exceptional adventure of our cul-
ture, a movement of which we tried
to guess the phases and the final out-
come.
He represented in our time the
latest example of that long line of
moralistes whose works constitute
perhaps the most original element
in French letters. His obstinate hu-
manism, narrow and pure, austere
and sensual, waged an uncertain war
against the massive and formless
events of the time. But on the other
hand through his dogged rejections
he reaffirmed, at the heart of our
epoch, against the Machiavellians
and against the Idol of realism, the
existence of the moral issue.
In a way, he was that resolute
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affirmation. Anyone who read or re-
flected encountered the human
values he held in his fist; he ques-
tioned the political act. One had to
avoid him or fight him—he was in-
dispensable to that tension which
makes intellectual life what it is.
His very silence, these last few years,
had something positive about it:
This Descartes of the Absurd refused
to leave the safe ground of morality
and venture on the uncertain paths
of practicality. We sensed this and
we also sensed the conflicts he kept
hidden, for ethics, taken alone, both
requires and condemns revolt.
We were waiting; we had to wait;
we had to know. Whatever he did or
decided subsequently, Camus would
never have ceased to be one of the
chief forces of our cultural activity
or to represent in his way the history
of France and of this century. But we
should probably have known and
understood his itinerary. He said so
himself: "My work lies ahead." Now
it is over. The particular scandal of
his death is the abolition of the
human order by the inhuman.
The human order is still but a dis-
order: it is unjust and precarious;
it involves killing, and dying of
hunger; but at least it is founded,
maintained, or resisted by men. In
man on the move questioned us, was
himself a question seeking its reply;
he lived in the middle of a long life;
for us, for him, for the men who
maintain order and for those who
reject it, it was important for him
to break his silence, for him to de-
cide, for him to conclude. Some die
in old age while others, forever on
reprieve, may die at any minute
without the meaning of their life,
of life itself, being changed. But for
us, uncertain, without a compass, our
best men had, to reach the end of the
tunnel. Rarely have the nature of
a man's work and the conditions of
the historical moment so clearly de-
manded that a writer go on living.
I call the accident that killed
Camus a scandal because it suddenly
projects into the center of our hu-
man world the absurdity of our most
fundamental needs. At the age of
twenty, Camus, suddenly afflicted
with a malady that upset his whole
life, discovered the Absurd—the
senseless negation of man. He be-
came accustomed to it, he thought
out his unbearable condition, he
came through. And yet one is tempt-
ed to think that only his first works
tell the truth about his life, since
that invalid once cured is annihilat-
ed by an unexpected death from the
outside.
The Absurd might be that ques-
tion that no one will ask him now,
that he will ask no one, that silence
that is not even a silence now, that
is absolutely nothing now.
I don't think so. The moment it
appears, the inhuman becomes a part
of the human. Every life that is cut
off—even the life of so young a m a n -
is at one and the same time a phono-
graph record that is broken and a
complete life. For all those who
loved him, there is an unbearable
absurdity in that death. But we shall
have to learn to see that mutilated
work as a total work. Insofar as
Camus' humanism contains a human
attitude toward the death that was
to take him by surprise, insofar as
his proud and pure quest for hap-
piness implied and called for the in-
human necessity of dying, we shall
recognize in that work and in the
life that is inseparable from it the
pure and victorious attempt of one
man to snatch every instant of his
existence from his future death.
THE REPORTER

Cage Without Bars
FRED GRUNFELD
T N MODERN PAINTING the race has
*• already gone to the swift—to the
quick brush and the quart can of
enamel that dribbles casually across
the canvas. The avant-garde now
functions as a duly recognized acad-
emy, supported by curators, collec-
tors, and critics. In music, however,
developments tend to lag just a little
behind events in the sister arts.
Since music is subject to so many
technical limitations, the automa-
tists have had trouble deciding
where to begin: you can't just spat-
ter notes on manuscript paper with
a spray gun because, for one thing,
a spray gun's range is wider than a
trumpet's.
The only truly spontaneous com-
poser I know of was Domenico Scar-
latti's cat, whom he once caught
walking on the keys of his clavier,
thereby providing the theme of the
celebrated "Cat's Fugue." Still we
must clearly count this as a case of
cat proposes, man disposes. Some of
our best-trained modern composers
envy that cat her casualness, her
lack of creative inhibitions. Like
their colleagues of the paintbrush,
the musical avant-gardists regard
chance as their most valuable ally
and invoke it as fervently as ever a
romantic prayed for inspiration
from the muses.
E FOREMOST creator of music by
accident, a middle-aging Califor-
nian named John Cage, dramatically
introduced this concept about ten
years ago, at a Columbia University
concert. He himself conducted the
history-making first performance of
"Imaginary Landscape No. 4," a
work scored for twelve table-model
radios. Two players were assigned
to each radio, one to tune from sta-
tion to station, the other to turn the
volume up or down on cue. In the
random counterpoint of words and
music that emerged we heard a frag-
ment of some commercial, a few bars
of jazz, a snippet of news commen-
tary, and so forth, all cunningly
intermixed in strict time to Cage's
pontifical beat. This fortuitous chorus
may not have made everyone happy,
February 4, 1960
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
but at least we left the hall knowing
that we had undergone a unique ex-
perience, that it would never happen
again in just the same way.
Reduced to its essentials, Cage's
argument for his unpredictable mu-
sic proceeds from the premise that
the world is full of sounds, some of
them intentional but mostly acci-
dental—traffic noises, steam knock-
ing in the radiator, thunder rolling
out of the sky. A composer may try
to organize random sounds, or he
may devise new ways of letting them
speak for themselves. He may be-
come a creator of opportunities, a
manipulator of accidents. In prac-
tice this may mean shifting much of
the responsibility onto the perform-
er's shoulders, thus relinquishing
the composer's hard-won control
over what occurs in the concert hall.
In Cage's recent "Concert for
Piano and Orchestra," for instance,
the piano part contains a folio of
eighty-four different passages shuf-
fled like a deck of cards, and the
soloist "is free to play any elements
of his choice, wholly or in part and
in any sequence. The orchestral ac-
companiment may involve any num-
ber of players on more or fewer
instruments, and a given perform-
ance may be extended or shorter in
length." The haphazardness of this
method reflects Cage's preoccupation
with the three-thousand-year-old
Chinese Book of Changes, the /
Ching, in which—according to trans-
lator Richard Wilhelm—"Attention
centers not on things in their state of
being, as is chiefly the case in the
Occident, but upon their move-
ments in change." For an esoteric
composer, the / Ching has the fur-
ther advantages of obscurity, ambigu-
ity, and endorsement by C. G. Jung.
In May, 1958, Cage and his friends
gave a twenty-five-year retrospec-
tive concert of his works at Town
Hall, and the proceedings were doc-
umented on tape by George Avakian,
a veteran jazz authority and re-
cording director. As a special labor
of love he has just released a special
three-record set containing the en-
tire concert, including a generous
PRODUCED 2004 BY UNZ.ORG
admixture of catcalls and applause.
(Priced at $25, the albums are avail-
able directly from the producer, at
10 West Thirty-third Street, New
York.) In the most comprehensive
program notes ever compiled for
contemporary recordings, Cage ex-
plains their background in detail;
in every aspect the booklet and rec-
ords are a milestone for the experi-
mental wing of modern music.
But the proof of the pudding,
after all, rests not in Cage's elaborate
theorizing but simply in the hearing
of his pieces. As a matter of fact,
most of them stand up extraordi-
narily well under repeated listening—
the clangorous music for electronic
carillon, for example, or the fragile
sonatas for "prepared" piano, per-
formed by Maro Ajemian, that ring
fascinating changes on faintly Ori-
ental themes—like an atavistic mem-
ory of a gamelan gong. Cage's
heavier-footed experiments of the
1930's sound contrived by compari-
son, and his "Williams Mix" for tape
recorder is a skittish and superficial
affair. But if you will go to the trou-
ble of sitting down with the retro-
spective and meet it about halfway,
chances are that you will at least, as
Thurber would say, be amused by
its presumption.
A Feldman,Cage
YOUNG disciple, Morton
has just appeared on
his first LP (Columbia ML 5403,
$4.98) with works bearing titles that
might have come straight out of the
Guggenheim: "Intersection 3," "Ex-
tension 1," "Projection 4," and so
forth. Feldman, too, advocates the
overthrow of fixed notation and pro-
motes accidents to the best of his
ability. The program notes explain
that in some instances he employs
"unpredictability reinforced by spon-
taneity . . . what [the performer]
plays is not dictated beyond the
graph 'control'—the range of a given
passage and its temporal area and
division are indicated, but the ac-
tual notes heard must come from
the performer's response to the musi-
cal situation." The actual notes
heard on this record, unfortunately,
sound hopelessly coarse if not down-
right inept, and I am somewhat at a
loss to find the responsible party. It
has not yet occurred to either Cage
or Feldman to let us know7 what
they think of the outcome when the
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